In the following list you can check the highlights of 4.2 organized by component (a detailed list of changes can be found here):

• Datastore Monitoring, the capacity of the datastores is now monitored by the drivers. This will help users and admins to quickly identify the resource usage of the cloud. Admins can also set security threshold in capacity usage.
• New Hooks, you can now program hooks on any transition. Also the information of the previous state can be passed as a hook argument to customized the action depending on the original VM state.

• VMware, the whole set of VMware drivers, storage, networking and virtualization has been greatly improved. The storage system has been simplified and made more efficient, see more here ::. The networking drivers have been also streamlined. Monitoring of ESXi hosts is now complete and the functionality of the virtualization drivers is now leveled with KVM and Xen. In the process the runtime dependencies of VMware has been reduced by accessing the native VMware VI API.

• Xen, support for the Xen4 interfaces through the xl command. Xen3 is totally supported with its own set of drivers

OpenNebula Gate (onegate) is the VM gate to OpenNebula. With a security token the VMs can callback home and report guest and/or application status in a simple way, that can be easily queried through OpenNebula interfaces (Suntone, CLI or API).

OpenNebula Gate metrics can be also used in conjuntion with OneFlow to develop advanced auto-scaling policies. More information about OpenNebula Gate here ::

Sunstone has been polished since its redesign in 4.0:

• Improved VNC, you can now detach VNC sessions from the Sunstone tab. This let you use the whole window area, prevents synchronization problems with mouse pointers, and… yes make ESC key to work!
• VM definition update, the template dialog is also used to update your VM definitions without the need to go to the text based view.
• Self-service view, we have a created a “cloudy” provisioning scheme for users, see more on this here ::
• Performance improvements, internal improvements in the information management and resource access.

:: Include brief description and summary of new features. Now included in the main distribution.

• Elasticity policies
• Service management, recover of fault situations, increase/decrease of cardinality, role operations….
• Updated sunstone interface

::

OpenNebula is released under the Apache 2.0 open source license. The complete source tree and binary packages for OpenNebula can be downloaded here.

Please report any bug or send feedback at the development portal or at the mailing list.

The documentation of OpenNebula 4.2 can be found here.

:: The OpenNebula project would like to thank the community members and users who have contributed to this software release by being active with the discussions, answering user questions, or providing patches for bugfixes, features and documentation.

More information about the project can be found at the project web page. You may be also interested in checking the OpenNebula Ecosystem that includes many interesting projects contributed by the community to enhance or add new features to OpenNebula.